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  What, then, is the “China” that inspires such devotion? Going through some old magazine cuttings from the time I lived in Hong Kong in the 1980s, I found various expressions of “Chineseness,” all vague, all, it seems, deeply felt. In 1984, an Indonesian-Chinese wrote in a Hong Kong paper: “Back in my Southern Hemisphere, I feel the wind of the night in my face and lean out of my window, looking longingly at the stars—I pray with all my heart for the glory and good fortune of my ancestral land.” A Chinese-American expressed his sentiments in another Hong Kong magazine: “ ‘China’ is a cultural entity which flows incessantly, like the Yellow River, from its source all the way to the present time, and from here to a boundless future. This is the basic and unshakable belief in the mind of every Chinese. It is also the strongest basis for Chinese nationalism. No matter which government is in power, people will not reject China, for there is always hope for a better future a hundred or more years from now.” This same man described the Chinese people, wherever they may be, in Beijing, or Toronto, Hong Kong, or Amsterdam, as “an almost sacred and thus unassailable entity.”

  The language is overblown, but the Chinese-American patriot managed to convey the nature of Chinese nationalism, of the myth of “China.” The religious phrases form part of the confusion. “China” is more than a nation-state, although both the nation and the state are parts of the myth; “China” is all that is “under heaven,” a cosmic idea. Even though China has been broken up into various states throughout much of its history, the ideal state of affairs is the unity of all under heaven, protected by barbarian-resistant walls. Although Chinese is not one language but many languages that can be expressed in more or less the same literary form, the myth is that “Chinese” is one. Although many races live under heaven, the majority Han race is supposed to be one, and when Chinese speak of “Chinese,” they really mean the Han; but in fact even the Han are made up of many different ethnic groups, whose origins may not even be in China. Although the cosmic state under heaven is supposed to represent harmony and order, the real state of China has been marked by thousands of years of conflict and disorder. Although Chinese civilization is a complex mixture of many cultures, both high and low, the myth has reduced it to one great tradition, roughly described as Confucianism.

  “China,” then, is an orthodoxy, a dogma, which disguises politics as culture and nation as race. Order under heaven is based on “correct thinking.” Heterodoxy “confuses” people’s minds and should therefore be stamped out. The Communist Party imposed its own dogma while claiming the Chinese myth, too. Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and, latterly, socialism with Chinese characteristics may have replaced Confucianism as the reigning orthodoxy, but those who challenge the orthodoxy—the most precise definition of dissidents—are branded as “unpatriotic,” “anti-Chinese,” or even “un-Chinese,” as well as “counterrevolutionary,” as though all these amounted to the same thing.

  My general preoccupation with the Chinese myth came into sharper focus one evening in the winter of 1996, when I was asked to introduce the activist Harry Wu to an audience in Amsterdam. Wu, who lived in California, was in Europe to promote his latest book on political prisoners in China’s forced-labor camps. I met him for breakfast on the day of his talk. He struck me as a man who was driven by his cause to the point of obsession. After spending nineteen years in prison for being a “rightist” (he had criticized the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian uprising in 1956), this was hardly surprising. While fiercely spearing his ham and scrambled eggs, he spoke about thousands of prisons and labor camps in China containing hundreds of thousands of prisoners. He spoke about the brutal struggle for survival in those terrible places. He spoke about the trade in organs plucked from the corpses of freshly executed prisoners. And he spoke about China, a “miserable country,” with venom; the Chinese people were “fanatical in their selfishness,” he said. He gobbled his breakfast up in big mouthfuls. The sound of his mouth working on his ham and eggs was all that broke, for a few seconds at a time, his tirade against his fellow Chinese.

  That evening, he spoke to a large audience. Again the stories about the labor camps, the detention centers, and the prisons. Again the tales of his personal suffering and his sense of guilt at having survived, by stealing the last scraps of food from others who were starving. (Once he actually scraped something barely edible from a rat hole, thereby depriving the rat.) He finished by making an eloquent speech in favor of civil liberties and democracy.

  Then it was time for questions. One man asked him about the approximate number of people who had been detained in labor camps. About 50 million, Wu thought. Someone else asked him about Mao, and yet another person about the reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Then a young woman raised her hand. She looked Chinese and I assumed she was until she opened her mouth and spoke English in a thick Dutch accent. “Mr. Wu,” she said. “We are both Chinese, and it is not easy to talk about our culture in front of non-Chinese.” Indeed, she found it painful to discuss the problems of “our Chinese culture.” But, she continued, wouldn’t Mr. Wu agree with her that democracy was an alien concept in Chinese culture? And that being so, how could we possibly expect such Western values to take root in “our Confucian tradition”?

  Wu looked at her impatiently. I could see the muscles in his jaw stiffen. I can’t remember his precise answer. But he was used to this kind of thing; he heard it from Chinese-Americans all the time. In her naÏve way, the Dutch woman expressed the Chinese myth, the orthodoxy, seemingly as a critic but in fact as someone who took it at face value, as though “our Confucian tradition” were a stone monument, unchanged and unchanging, as though it were the only tradition in China.

  Harry Wu comes from a highly educated Catholic family in Shanghai. This alone would have made him an outsider in Communist China. He is also a damaged survivor of terrible brutality, which makes him obsessive, difficult, impatient, and perhaps ruthless. But for whatever reason, he is a man who defied orthodoxy. There are other Chinese like him, who are neither Christian nor from a background of high education. It was while listening to Wu and his Dutch questioner that evening that I had the idea of writing about “China” from the point of view of the mavericks, the rebels, and the dissidents. Their personal stories would, I hoped, help us understand the mesmerizing force of the Chinese myth as well as the reasons why some people are brave or mad enough to challenge it.

  These stories took me to all parts of the Chinese-speaking world, because I wanted to show how people who shared the same cultural traditions could choose very different ways to organize their societies. Politics is never a pure reflection of some monolithic culture. There are in fact several Chinas. Seen from Beijing, Taiwan is a renegade Chinese province. Seen from Taipei, Taiwan is the legitimate Republic of China to some and the independent republic of Taiwan to others, depending on their politics. Hong Kong is now part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) but still retains its own government. Although more than 70 percent of its citizens are ethnically Chinese, Singapore is not part of China at all. But its government likes to think of itself as a model Chinese government, based on so-called Asian values, which are really more like a pastiche of Confucian values, which serve very nicely as a justification for the conservative Chinese ideal of that moral authoritarian order in which every person knows his place under heaven.

  Encounters with Chinese dissidents and protesters threw up new questions. Why were so many of them Christians? Some, like Harry Wu, had Christian parents; many more had converted. Is it perhaps true, as Christians often claim, that a faith which came of age in Europe can be the only basis for liberal institutions that also ripened there? Is there something about Christianity—its egalitarianism, perhaps—that lends itself to struggles for political freedom? Or will other faiths, more in tune with Chinese traditions, provide the spur for political change? What, if any, is the connection between spiritual and political change?

  This book, the product of my journeys among the Chinese awkward
squad, cannot offer a definite answer to these questions. The Chinese world is changing too fast for anyone to be definite about anything. My conclusions have to be tentative. Naturally, I have my sympathies and prejudices, which reflect to some degree my own background and upbringing. Testing them in places where different norms operate is part of the fascination of travel. But my aim is not to tell the reader what to think, or to predict the future; it is, rather, to make political questions less abstract by providing a context that is nothing if not human, personal, individual. Having studied China as an abstraction in the early 1970s, I have tried to bring it alive as a society of individuals, with peculiar personal histories. If this helps readers to understand the politics of Chinese-speaking nations, so much the better. If it makes them realize that Chinese (not “the Chinese,” another abstraction) are not utterly unlike us, whoever we may be, and that freedom from torture, persecution, and spiritual or intellectual coercion is a common desire among all human beings and not merely a Western notion, it would be better still.

  My Chinese journeys were not continuous. But if there is no strictly chronological logic to the journeys, there is a geographical one. I approached the center from the periphery: Beijing is the center, the last stop. From Los Angeles, then, to Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) on the fringes of China, to the final destination. This lends a certain coherence to my enterprise, but there is a political logic to it as well: As a rule, individual freedom diminishes the closer one gets to the center. The U.S. is freer than Taiwan, Taiwan is freer than Hong Kong, Hong Kong is freer than the SEZs, and the SEZs are freer than Beijing. If one imagines Chinese state orthodoxy to be a game of Chinese whispers, the greater the distance from the center, the more the message loses its power, even though faint echoes can still be heard as far away as Amsterdam.

  Part I

  The Exiles

  Chapter 1

  Exile from

  Tiananmen Square

  We will never know how many people were killed during that sticky night of June 3 and the early hours of June 4, 1989. A stink of burning vehicles, gunfire, and stale sweat hung heavily on Tiananmen Square; thousands of tired bodies huddled in fear around the Monument to the People’s Heroes, with its carved images of earlier rebels: the Taiping, the Boxers, the Communists of course, and also the student demonstrators of May 4, 1919, who saw “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” as the twin solutions to China’s political problems. The huge, rosy face of Chairman Mao stared from the wall of the Forbidden City across three or four dead bodies lying where his outsize shoes would have been had his portrait stretched that far. Tracer bullets and flaming cars lit up the sky in bursts of pale orange. Loudspeakers barked orders to leave the square immediately, or else. Spotlights were switched off and then on again. And over the din of machine-gun fire, breaking glass, stamping army boots, screaming people, wailing sirens, and rumbling APCs, young voices, hoarse from exhaustion, sang the “Internationale,” followed by the patriotic hit song of the year, “Descendants of the Dragon”:

  In the ancient East there is a dragon;

  China is its name.

  In the ancient East there lives a people,

  The dragon’s heirs every one.

  Under the claws of this mighty dragon I grew up

  And its descendant I have become.

  Like it or not—

  Once and forever, a descendant of the dragon . . .

  The words, which reduced the remaining students to tears, expressed pride in “Chineseness” as well as a sense of oppression that goes with it. The singer and composer of the song was Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese rock star who had moved to China from Taiwan in 1983, his way of coming “home,” of feeling fully Chinese. But the oppression soon got to him. So he became a kind of rock-and-roll mentor of the Tiananmen Movement, his last great hope for a patriotic resolution to China’s problems. When the shooting began, some students elected to die rather than retreat, but Hou talked them out of such pointless self-sacrifice, and negotiated with the army so the students could leave the Square alive. Afterward, he was forced to go back to Taiwan, where, disgusted with Chinese politics, he turned his attention to Chinese folk religions instead.

  By 5 a.m. on June 4, the massacre in Beijing was more or less over, though some people were still shot in the head or chest by snipers from the 27th Army, which had last seen action during the Sino-Vietnamese war, more than ten years earlier. By daybreak the last students had retreated from the square in a single file. The Tiananmen demonstrations for free speech, independent student and workers’ unions, and the recognition of the student demonstrators as “patriots” had ended in failure. The government had offered no concessions. Five days after the killings, the paramount leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, praised the army for crushing the plot1 of “a rebellious clique” bent on establishing “a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West.”

  Compared to the famines caused by Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962 (more than 30 million dead) or the regular purges of “rightists,” “revisionists,” and other “counterrevolutionary elements” during the 1950s and 1960s, the death toll in Beijing was modest. The figured offered by the Chinese government, as well as some foreign journalists, is around three hundred. Other estimates range from twenty-seven hundred to many more. But never before had the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) publicly aimed its guns at unarmed Chinese citizens with the intention of murdering them, and not just in the capital but in more than three hundred cities all over China. Most of the victims—on the night itself and in the following months—shot in the neck with single bullets, for which their families were duly billed, were not students but ordinary citizens. The PLA had done to its own people what Soviet tanks had done decades before in Budapest and Prague.

  Since the recent publication of The Tiananmen Papers, we probably know a little bit more about what went on behind the walls of Zhongnanhai, the government quarters next to the Forbidden City. There, the Communist leaders fought among themselves in an atmosphere of intrigue and panic as scattered student protests grew into a movement in early May. “Reformists,” led by Party general-secretary Zhao Ziyang, advocated a peaceful solution, by negotiating with the students, but “hard-liners,” led by Premier Li Peng, opposed any kind of compromise. In the end, the hard-liners, backed by a group of Party elders, some of them barely literate, prevailed. Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, made his decision. Zhao would have to step down. No concessions to the counterrevolutionaries. And on May 20, martial law was imposed on Beijing.

  Fissures running through the student movement were as deep as those that split the government. Some student leaders wanted to declare victory in May and retreat from the Square. Others—prompted by new batches of students freshly arrived from the provinces, and egged on by radicalized Beijing intellectuals thirsting for action—favored a tougher line: hunger strikes, no retreat, no compromise with government officials no matter who they were. Tactical quarrels and mutual denunciations went on until the night of the killings. And they continue to this day, inside the government, but also among the dissidents and former student leaders living in exile.

  Since none of this can be openly discussed in China, the fallout of Tiananmen rains down in peculiar ways. The internal Party documents published as The Tiananmen Papers, were probably compiled and smuggled out of China by people in the reformist camp, as a way to discredit Li Peng and his fellow hard-liners. And Chinese in exile still tear one another apart over the failures of 1989. Should the students have retreated before the tanks came in? Should they have given the government “face,” and thus helped Zhao Ziyang retain his position? Did they have a choice? Is slow reform, beginning inside the Communist Party itself, the only way forward? Or will it take a revolution to break the Party’s monopoly on power? These are all fascinating questions that are too often buried in a poisonous brew of hostile gossip and recrimination.

  My own interest in these quarrels was
not as a historian of Tiananmen. I wanted to know more about the rebels themselves and the nature of their dissent. The politics of the students, intellectuals, workers, journalists, and others who became involved in the rebellion were too confused, contradictory, and murky to invite easy conclusions. And what they say ten years after the fact about 1989 should not be taken at face value. What we have are interpretations, a Rashomon story. The interpretations, as always with such tales, tell us more about the people who offer them than about the story itself. To complicate things, the interpretations change over time, according to circumstances. As my first step into the world of Chinese rebellions, the Rashomon of Tiananmen seemed an obvious place to start.

  Most of the prominent student leaders of Tiananmen Square are now living abroad, in the United States, France, and elsewhere. They have joined older dissidents from previous mutinies in one of the largest political diasporas in history, comparable to that of the French Huguenots in the seventeenth century, Russians after 1919, Germans after 1933, or Hungarians and Czechs in the 1950s and 1960s.